Information and Imagery from Ukraine

Russian professor: Russia is a ‘Fascist-Soviet hybrid’

Observers of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict from its early stages in 2014 may remember a lone Russian academic, political science Prof. Andrei Zubov of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), who dared to publicly oppose the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, comparing it to Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Taking this stance in today’s Russia is enough to invite severe reprisals, and Prof. Zubov was fired soon after making his remarks. Indeed, the only member of the Russian parliament to vote against Crimea’s annexation was publicly lambasted as a ‘traitor’ in a campaign of vilification involving huge billboards in Russian cities accusing him of treason. The MP ultimately fled abroad. Prof. Zubov has recently gone further in his criticism of the Russian regime, at the 8th Kyiv Security Forum from 28-29 May 2015…

‘In Russia we have a hybrid state. As a matter of fact it is fascist, but it is to some extent coated with a shell of the Soviet past,’ said the scholar.

In his opinion, such a state ‘does not have a positive future.’

Andrei Zubov

Zubov said that during the Putin regime ‘a restoration of the Soviet past’ has been observed. This is occurring in many ways, but not completely: if the USSR was ruled by a socialist economy, now in Russia, ‘almost half of the private property is in the hands of about 30 private owners, and the rest is in the hands of the state.’

‘That is why we what we have now is not a socialist form, but – rather – we have a corporate state, a national-corporate state. And this national-corporate state resembles the Fascist Italy of the Mussolini era significantly more than it resembles the Soviet Union,’ he said.

Commenting on the conflict in the Donbas, Professor Zubov said that is not a war between two countries, but a struggle between two principles: the European-humanistic, and the Soviet-totalitarian. ‘And the whole struggle that we are now seeing between Ukraine and Russia – this is in fact a struggle between these two approaches to life. One approach puts the person at the center, and the second is when something else is at the center, and the person is a means for the existence of some great concept, abstract principle: state, nation, race,’ he said.

To convince the professor, the whole problem is that in the countries of the USSR, with the exception of the Baltic republics, the process of de-Communization and de-totalitarianization was not fully carried out. Ukraine has embarked on this path, proof of which was the Revolution of Dignity.